Tracking and managing electronic assets are becoming more and more challenging in our highly connected and wired environments. Individuals and enterprises are increasing spending monetary and human capital to improve asset tracking. A variety of document management services are currently available in the industry to assist and accommodate the growing trend in this area.
Individuals and enterprises accumulate knowledge and transact their affairs via electronic assets, such as documents, presentations, images, videos, messages, graphics, and other electronic data. Many times these assets are generated and modified within their native software applications. These applications have their own default storage locations or directories. Often individuals are unfamiliar with these storage locations and may forget where a particular asset was housed.
In addition to this problem, some assets are version sensitive. This means that the author may want to maintain a variety of versions for a particular asset and revert back to a prior version at any particular point in time. To achieve this, individuals or enterprises may develop and manually adhere to a comprehensive naming scheme, such that specific versions of an asset are readily ascertainable from the asset's naming convention. Alternatively, individuals or enterprises may deploy a document management system.
The first approach is difficult to implement and relies on the discipline, training, and acceptance of the users; so, it generally suffers from lack of universal acceptance within an enterprise and suffers from quality problems since often forgetfulness may set the approach back.
The second approach necessitates an investment, within an enterprise, and requires that the desired document management system be operational when a user accesses an asset or requires that the document management system be integrated in the asset generating and modifying editors, such that the document management system can be initiated for each asset that a user may modify. Thus, a robust document management system is desirable to ensure it integrates with asset editors being used within an enterprise. Yet, new editors appear regularly and new versions of existing editors appear even more frequently. So, there is a regular integration and support issue that accompanies even the best document management solution within an enterprise.
Furthermore, if an audit history is desired for a particular asset then the first approach requires a detailed knowledge of the operating system such that ad hoc evaluation or customized programs may be developed to reproduce an audit history of the assets named with version-specific naming conventions. The second approach provides a better audit history technique but it relies on the document management system, such that if the document management system is offline or is replaced then the audit histories are unavailable or lost as well.
Thus, it can be seen that improved techniques for asset tracking are desirable.